Andrea Sanchez looks out the front window of Boxcar Gallery as artist Karolina McLean paints her body during the First Friday Art Walk on Santa Fe Drive in October 2011. (Lindsay Pierce, YourHub)

By Craig Marshall Smith Colorado Voices

I have gone on my final First Friday Art Walk. You can take the word “Art” out of it and change it to “Nachos” because now it’s the First Friday Nachos Walk and Irksome Shindig.[2]

A friend of mine, another varsity curmudgeon, used to say, “Smith, good things change and bad things get worse.” The First Friday Art Walk has changed, at least the version on Santa Fe Drive. There are also First Fridays in the Golden Triangle, the River North Art District (RiNo), on Tennyson Street, Navajo Street, and Old South Pearl Street. Those may still be humane.

But the one held on Santa Fe Drive is out of control, or at least it is out of my control. It has become immensely popular. It began as a legitimate art walk involving more than 60 participating galleries, artist studios, and restaurants. As the audience grew, it changed from art lovers to party-hearty lovers. The art is tertiary.

“Make mine nachos and chicken wings.”

We do that in the Unites States. We can take a meaningful championship football game, and turn it into a nauseating hybrid of the Mardi Gras. It’s now called the Super Bowl. It got its name from the Super Ball toy.

The weeks before the game are insufferable. The pre-game shows are unbearable, the halftime shows are appalling, and the post-game shows are dreadful.

You’d think that Jesus was playing wide receiver. The commercials during the game are treated as if they might qualify for Best Short Subject at the Academy Awards. The game itself is immaterial.

That’s exactly what has happened on Santa Fe Drive. The art is immaterial.

Get this: Food truck operators deploy automobiles the night before to park in front of galleries, and to hold the spaces all day for the food trucks to occupy the next night. It’s all very legal. The truck operators have to pay for their spaces.

You and I aren’t so lucky. I arrived 90 minutes before the galleries opened on a recent First Friday and had to park three blocks away. One time I was reckless and arrived at 6, and had to pay to park five blocks away — to attend my own opening.

From the car to the gallery, I had to serpentine through a thicket of our snot-nosed youth, all on phones, all ambivalent to pedestrian traffic. And all ambivalent to art.

I exhibit on Santa Fe, and I am resigned by now to the circus on the first Friday of every month. It occurred to me that I can turn off my fear and loathing of it simply by not showing up.

Or by sending an imposter, to be me at my exhibitions. Andy Warhol did that. If you are a handsome, glib, sarcastic, middle-aged man with gray hair and Europtics, please get in touch.

There are not only food trucks. There is abhorrent music. There are other vendors. And my least favorites: solicitors. You see, the art created the audience for these characters, and now the art is treated like the family dog after the baby arrives. Sent to the backyard.

Acknowledging that I am a humbug, I am certain the New Art Walk is making a lot more people happy than the Old Art Walk ever could. Art galleries can be intimidating, but when you walk in the door and see others with chicken wing sauce on their faces, it’s not nearly as overawing.

Galleries set out food and drink too, which is a muscular mistake. The locusts haven’t eaten all day or all week. They eat the food and the plates. Drink like fish, belch, and move to the buffet next door.

I was once actually asked a question about one of my paintings, and all I could say was, “brushes.”

True story:

“I’m going to First Friday.”

“You must really love art.”

“I do. I do. But I’ll go look at the art some other time.”

Craig Marshall Smith of Highlands Ranch is an artist and a member of The Denver Post’s 2009 Colorado Voices panel. Colorado Voices is an annual competition among writers vying for the opportunity to publish columns of regional interest in The Denver Post.